In 2019, just 4 years after its launch, 1mg had carved out a completely new & untapped eCommerce segment in India - healthcare products & services and was steadily progressing as the market leader in this segment. The exponential growth, however, had come at a cost - a broken digital architecture with lots of monolithic silos that didn't communicate with each other.

My job was to work closely with engineers, product managers, and business unit heads to make the digital platform completely modular, flexible, and easily scalable.

Building an integrated digital healthcare platform - but How?

Need for a unique brand positioning

1mg had started out as HealthKart Plus, a content-driven platform which was the first of its kind - it provided information on medicines prescribed by doctors and suggested alternatives with the same chemical composition. It was a brave step in empowering Indians to get more control & information on the treatment being provided to them by a healthcare facility.

When 1mg expanded into the business of selling healthcare products & services, they kept this core philosophy of empowerment at the centre stage of their vision:

<aside> 🇮🇳 Making healthcare Understandable, Accessible, and Affordable to all Indians

</aside>

In 2019, the market got pretty crowded with online pharmacies, and 1mg, being the earliest and most mature entrant, wanted to differentiate itself clearly from the rest. Their unique strength was a big panel of practicing doctors, medical and paramedical specialists and they wanted to leverage this to become a complete healthcare platform, beyond just a pharmacy.

The architectural change needed

Transforming into a digital clinic of sorts, is no easy feat. You need to be ready to cater to a myriad of patient needs:

• some patients may arrive with certain symptoms and want to see a doctor, then buy the medicines & book the tests prescribed
• some patients may come for a second opinion
• some patients may come to just get some tests done
• some patients may come to look for paramedical treatment, like physiotherapy, nutrition advice etc.
• and many, many more use cases....

This basically meant that there could be various types of entry points into the system, and the contents of a transaction could be a mixture of different products & services. To be ready to handle such requirements, 1mg needed to build a modular, flexible system architecture which would allow various types of entities (products/diagnostic tests/consultations/health plans etc.) to be served on the same fundamental eCommerce framework.

Scale at which the change had to be made

In 2019, when the brand was being repositioned, 1mg was already operating at a huge scale:

• More than 73 million users across web, Android & iOS in FY2019
• Around $27.5 million in revenue in FY2019